Well, I saw the eclipse. I am not even sure what to put in the description box. How can you describe a total solar eclipse? 

I have been waiting and planning for April 8 2024 for four years. Reality hit once I saw the shadow bands racing across the small patch of snow in front of me. The lightly dimming as the Moon's shadow came racing down the mountain. That last bit of the diamond ring slipping away into totality, where the suns corona immediately radiated into view. The rush of feelings while watching that was surreal. Seeing the prominences in bright red with your naked eye jutting out from a ring of white light is not something I will ever forget.

The other day I was looking for videos to see how the view was in Montreal, and I came across an interview with Oliver Hernandez, the Director of the Montreal Planetarium. He described the total eclipse as "a pure moment" and I can't think of a better way to put it.

The original plan was to fly town to Texas from Montreal to meet up and see the eclipse with my grandparents, whom took all my equipment when they drove down for their usual winter stay.  They were lucky enough to see the total eclipse of 1991 in Mexico, and essentially told me to stay in Quebec once the weather for Texas looked grim. It was more important to them that I see the eclipse, and now I understand why. Wow.

Of course, I only have a mount here. I had to get my parents to ship out my lens from Alberta; find a solar filter; and rent a camera all last minute. I was able to cobble together some kind of rig by Friday, and had to learn how to use a DSLR and Eclipse Orchestrator over the weekend. I was up until 3:00 AM Monday figuring all this stuff out. Aside from Eclipse Orchestrator locking up halfway through totality, things went pretty great. I sincerely hope I never have to use it again.

In terms of processing, maybe I will do a proper write up one day but as for now my brain is fried from trying to figure out the best way to do up this image. The gist was instead of the tried and true bracketing that is suggested, I only did two sets of bracketing just in case and slammed away at shorter exposures for the rest in order to build up a higher integration time to bring out as much of the corona as possible. This image is probably about 50 seconds of exposure time. The "shorter" exposures ended up being blown out close to the moon, so the brackets saved me in that regard.

I have to admit, I broke down a few times processing this image. Seeing a total eclipse is a such a profound and emotional experience that is easily life changing and processing this certainly brought me back to that small park in rural Quebec a few times.